End Summer With Flowers!

By Ericka Zorrilla

We all had a lot of fun during our summer vacations, wether we stayed in bed and slept all day or we had an adventurous day awaiting us. To top this amazing summer that you had, why not make an end of summer arrangement!

First you will need a clear vase that will be 5-6 in.tall. I used a mason jar because it was a cute jar that I had available in my kitchen. You don’t necessarily need to go buy one because you might have a mason jar or a clean jelly container. You want to fill up the vase up to 3 quarters, you can later add more water if needed. I added on the metal band from the jar to give it a nice modern look, you can decorate the mouth of the jar with ribbon or burlap as well.

Now for the flowers you will need, starting from left to right:

Some type of blue mallee eucalyptus seed that look similar the these, which you would want it to still be connected to the stem, it will give it a nice blooming look. Then you would want to look for something similar to the ‘safari sunset’ flower, which is going to be our main focus of this arrangement, moving on to our silver dollar eucalyptus. This will be our foliage, so we have some sort of green, this will also give a nice smell to it. We also want it so have some orangy and bright colors to insinuate that summer is sadly ending, but we are ready for fall, so we will be using echeveria albicans flowers. For our filler flowers we will be using some bougainvillea, it has a nice and vibrant color, we need some sort of filler so it won’t seem so empty.

Now you will need to add the ‘safari sunset’ , make sure that they are on the opposite direction of each other. We don’t want to be right beside of each other. The height of the flowers have to be between 4-4 ½ in. out of the vase. We don’t want anything to be bigger than that because this is just small and cute arrangement, anything too big will be take the purpose of the small vase insignificant.

This is where our echeveria albicans flowers come in and give it some bright color to this. You want to form an ‘x’ with these two types of flowers. We want all to be symmetrical if one side has one thing, we want the other side to have the same thing, since this is a round arrangement we all sides to be the same.

For this step you will need to have 3-4 stems of silver dollar eucalyptus. This will give it a nice and shine color and it will make it smell good at the same time. You would want to place it around the ‘safari sunset’ flowers and the echeveria albicans flowers. These flowers might move when you place the eucalyptus, but you will need to place them back how they were before.

For our color and filler we will now use the bougainvillea, we want to place it around the mouth of the jar, and some between the ‘safari sunset’ and the eucalyptus.

Our final touch will be the blue mallee eucalyptus seeds. This would be around the mouth of the jar, like the bougainvillea, try to place it in between the filler flowers.

Finished!

You have finally finished! Remember that everything has to be the same on one side just like on the other. We want everyone at the dinner table to have the same perspective as everyone else since this is a round arrangement.

All of these flowers, foliage, and filler flowers can be found here in valley center, I found all these in my front yard. You might need to go explore for some of these flowers, since most of them are native plants. Enjoy the rest of the summer we have and we are prepared for what fall might give us!